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Email marketing has been used for so many years that you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking it’s on its way to irrelevancy. The truth is, email marketing is not only still around, but remains a powerful marketing tool that is actually increasing in popularity.

In fact, according to Salesforce, it was the second-fastest growing B2C marketing tool from 2015 to 2017 (video claimed the top spot). That may seem surprising, but the stats from Salesforce’s survey show that email consistently outperforms other digital platforms in return on investment and cost-effectiveness.

Why? Because unlike many other marketing tools, email is able to change with the times by easily integrating new channels and strategies into it.

Here is how you can make sure that your email strategy meets the evolving demands of marketing to your customers.

1. Segmentation

The absolute first step to successful email marketing is having a great contact list, with as much information as possible. This will enable you to easily segment your list based on key filters, ensuring that you deliver the right message to the right audience.

2. Personalize

Customers are increasingly demanding to be treated like individuals, even online. That means you’ll need to spend more time analyzing each customer’s digital behavior so that you can create interactions that are as personal as possible.

While sending mass emails out to huge groups is a great way to ensure top-of-mind awareness, taking the extra step to personalize will pay dividends. According to research conducted by Aberdeen Group, personalized emails show an increase in clickthrough rates of 14% and an increase in conversions by 10%.

Some easy ways to do this are to simply use the word “you” so that readers feel like the email was written for them and to make subject lines appear personal by being direct and engaging rather than giving a bland overview of the email’s content. Just personalizing the subject line can increase the open rate for emails from 11.4% to 17.6% according to Statista.

3. Automate

Most companies aren’t going to have the resources or time to invest in the artificial intelligence capabilities that can interact with customers on a near-personal level. The next best thing is automation.

With the help of an experienced digital marketer, you can segment both when your emails are sent and who receives them. A good example is an automatic welcome email containing a “special offer” to new members of your email list. Doing this right takes time, patience, and testing.

4. Coordinate

Engaging customers across channels (e.g. website, social media, digital advertising, content marketing, video, or email) leads to significantly higher awareness, acquisition, and engagement. To do this well, your messaging must be properly coordinated across the channels you choose. High performers are over 12 times more likely to coordinate their marketing efforts to ensure consistency in their messaging.

However, that doesn’t mean every message should be identical wherever it is seen (remember personalization). Instead, you need to find the fruitful middle ground between consistency and targeting your message for each specific channel.

Don’t Disregard Email Marketing

It’s easy to convince yourself to follow the latest marketing trends. However, if you do email marketing right you won’t be blamed for sticking with an effective method that refuses to become irrelevant.

It just so happens that we are pretty great at email marketing. We regularly construct both segmented and general campaigns for our clients with great ROI. If you’d like to get started, don’t hesitate to give us a call or, of course, email us.